Many individuals use their limited time and financial resources to participate in several activities including employments, family life, charitable functions, sports, and social events. When more than one person is involved in the same activity, collaboration may be used to advantage to achieve a commonly desired goal. However, collaboration may be hindered by differences between the individual's intentions and commitments of time and financial resources. For example, individuals may not be able to meet together because prior time commitments by one or more of the individuals leave no open common time for a meeting.
Conventional systems include computer programs that present a personal appointment calendar. In some conventional systems, a user can divide appointments into groups and view a separate calendar presentation for each group of appointments. For example, one group of appointments may relate to the user's membership in a bridge club; while another group of appointments may relate to a program of personal physical fitness. These systems may include a calendar presentation of all appointments from all groups to enable the user to plan an activity in an uncommitted time period.
Use of conventional systems leaves unsolved problems. It remains difficult for many individuals to share information sufficient to effectively and economically collaborate, each one collaborating with different individuals in different spheres of their lives. Further, the costs of collaboration cannot be easily monitored. Conventional systems require time and expenses to be captured on systems separate from the system that presents and maintains each personal calendar. In particular, conventional systems for personal appointment calendars lack the capability to uniformly capture time and expense information from all individuals involved in collaborative activities and to enable separate accounting systems to prepare bills for payment of the associated fees and expenses.
Systems and methods of the present invention reduce the cost of collaboration. By making collaboration easier to manage for each individual, emotional and physical stresses on collaborating individuals are also reduced.